


tell me true (who are you)

by icygrace



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-17
Updated: 2014-09-17
Packaged: 2018-02-17 18:56:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2319911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icygrace/pseuds/icygrace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ned Stark brought a dark-haired, grey-eyed bastard babe home and called him son. Years later, Jon Targaryen does the same.</p>
            </blockquote>





	tell me true (who are you)

**Author's Note:**

> My first try playing in GRRM’s sandbox, this is based on a prompt I saw ages ago. It’s been a while since I read the books, so forgive any mistakes!

“Sansa Stark, Sansa Lannister, Alayne Stone, Alayne Hardyng. Tell me true, _who are you_?”

 

Sansa says nothing. She says nothing because she trusts no one, because she is heir to the North, the last Stark, the only thing standing in the way of the Dragon Queen being Queen of the _Seven_ Kingdoms, and thanks the Seven she no longer believes in that her hair was fresh-dyed when the queen’s lackeys captured her on her way north.

 

===

 

Upon Alayne Stone’s marriage to Harold Hardyng, Petyr Baelish reveals her true identity to the Vale lords.

 

When Petyr proceeds to kill Harry, too jealous and impatient to wait till Sansa has borne the Heir an heir and like as not to strangle the babe in the cradle if she had, she denounces him to the Vale lords to gain their loyalty. They all hate Littlefinger. 

 

But they all know the dangers that may befall the last Stark, so they agree that she must follow Petyr’s careful plan, begrudgingly admiring its wisdom. She must continue calling herself Alayne Hardyng until her position is strong enough to do otherwise.

 

It is on her way to strengthen that position – she is nearer home than she has been since she left for King’s Landing and, oh, how bittersweet it is– that Daenerys Targaryen’s men capture her.

 

===

 

“Pray recall what happened to the last false Stark,” the Dragon Queen continues.

 

Sansa bites her lip, hoping the physical pain will keep her tears at bay. She heard what happened to “Arya Stark,” married off to the monstrous Ramsay Snow. _Poor Jeyne, poor_ Arya . . .

 

It seems the queen believes Sansa not to be a Stark, but that she will nevertheless present herself as such. Why would Sansa do such a thing when it would mean her certain death?

 

“Your Grace, mayhaps you ought spare yourself the trouble. It would be easier to put her before the prince, he would –”

 

_The prince?_

Every prince Sansa knows is dead. Twisted Joffrey, sweet Tommen . . .

 

“Silence!” the queen orders, glaring fiercely at Ser Barristan.

 

Sansa wonders at his presence, but there are so many things she wonders at that she cannot dwell on them all.

 

Then the queen shakes her head, apologetic. “Ser, I appreciate your counsel, but I would rather spare him the pain of another pretender than spare myself some small trouble over her.”

 

Perhaps the Dragon Queen has a Prince Consort now. But why would a Stark pretender pain the man who warms Daenerys Targaryen’s bed?

 

===

 

It seems Sansa knew little and less in the Vale.

 

 _The prince_ is none other than her half-brother.

 

Well, no, not her half-brother in truth. The truth is nearly too fantastic to be believed.

 

Rhaegar Targaryen was no vile raper. Lyanna Stark ran off with him for love and married him. She gave her life in the birthing bed giving him a child. 

 

Nephew to the barren Dragon Queen, Sansa’s once-half brother is not just any prince, but the Crown Prince, heir to the Iron Throne, The Prince Who Was Promised.

 

It is like a tale out of a song.

 

===

 

Except in a song, a lady would never be forced to marry a man she once called brother.

 

Once the Battle of the Wall is won, the queen insists that they be wedded and bedded immediately.

 

The queen will never bear another child – Sansa knows not how this is known with such certainty, but it is – and she has but one heir now, her elder nephew, Jon’s half-brother Aegon, having been slain in battle. If Jon dies without issue, so too does the Dragon Queen’s line. The queen dares not ride into battle again knowing she has not done all she can to ensure that line survives.

 

Or rather, knowing that _she_ , Sansa, hasn’t done all she can to ensure that line survives. 

 

“We’ve yet to take the capital,” Jon protests, voice mild, but face anxious. He often speaks to his aunt as though she were a startled mare in need of calming when she gets into one of her fiercer moods. “We ought to wait, give the kingdom a grand spectacle, a celebration of our restored dynasty’s new beginnings after we emerge victorious.”

 

A grand spectacle is the last thing Jon wants, or Sansa for that matter, but they both want time most of all, though they have not spoken of it. They have spoken little of anything.

 

It is a contrast to previous conversations about their upcoming marriage. Jon positively exploded at his aunt when she stated that Sansa must give up any and all claims to the title Queen in the North after she first proposed their marriage as a means of peace between the independent North and the other Six Kingdoms remaining to her after Jon refused the first bride the queen suggested. But the queen had been unmoved and he had ultimately been forced to yield and Sansa to agree to sign away the North’s independence, the independence her brother and his bannermen had fought and bled and died for.

 

The queen has been Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea far longer than she has called herself Queen of Westeros and she behaves more like a conqueror than a traditional queen. The prospect of battle does not worry her. Her only fear is rendering her legacy meaningless and Jon alone holds its meaning in his hands.

 

Sansa suspects that even now Jon would not consent if she does not and that the queen knows that, but she also does not think the queen is above forcing them both. Should she choose to do so, she certainly can.

 

She has dragons.

 

A _nd gold_ , Sansa thinks greedily, desperately, despairing at the state of Winterfell.

 

Jon had looked as she felt when they’d first seen the keep – and that after the queen had sent gold and supplies ahead to feed and pay laborers to begin repairs. She had begun the effort before her men captured Sansa, hoping to please her remaining nephew and heir by rebuilding his childhood home.

 

They have neither, so they have no choice but to obey when the queen shakes her head.

 

===

 

Well, _Jon_ had a choice.

 

The Dragon Queen first orders him to honor Aegon’s betrothal to Arianne Martell, heiress of Sunspear.

 

But for all his Stark looks, Jon is not Sansa’s father. He refuses to take his dead brother’s bride-to-be, refuses to take all that was to be Aegon’s, as though Aegon had never existed. Her father cleaved to duty and Jon cleaves to honor. He will not marry the Dornish princess, believing that bedding the woman who would have been Aegon’s wife when he would someday wear the crown that was to have been Aegon’s, would be one insult too many, too dishonorable to be borne.

 

No matter what the queen does or says, how she pleads and scolds and eventually rages that the Martells will see Jon’s refusal to honor the betrothal as the direst insult, “and coming from the son of Rhaeger’s _other_ wife, no less,” Jon does not yield.

 

He merely shrugs – Sansa assumes he shrugs, she can very nearly hear it in his words – before the queen’s anger. “Send me back to the Wall, then, aunt.”

 

Daenerys seethes, taking it for the taunt it is (or the taunt it would have been had it come from any other), knowing she can do no such thing. As her heir, Jon needs to hold lands and father children. He can do neither on the Wall and they both know it.

 

“Well, then, what am I to do with you? Wed you to Lady Sansa instead?”

 

Jon says nothing.

 

===

 

They wed before the heart tree.

 

Jon has never looked more like her father than he does that day and Sansa finds herself thinking of her mother, how that solemn Northern face must have made a young, lively Southron girl feel.

 

It is a sobering thought, but a better one than most others she might have. She can feel eyes on her, the gaze of the Viper’s daughter, one of the so-called Sand Snakes, who is attending on behalf of House Martell.

 

House Martell, whose alliance with House Targaryen might have been cemented if Princess Arianne’s cousin and betrothed still lived and married her or if Jon had not refused to do so in his stead.

 

If the Dornish feel half so slighted as Daenerys feared, then the choice of Sansa must add insult to injury, another Targaryen prince preferring another daughter of House Stark to a Martell princess. Sansa has never felt herself as Stark as her siblings, but now, with no living sister or brothers, she is the Stark in Winterfell. There is no other, and the thought has her fit to weep.

 

But it is her wedding day and she _will not weep_. She is no pretty fool, no little bird, no scared child. She is strong, she is proud. She is the Stark in Winterfell, but it is the Martell words that ring in her ears on her wedding day, that give her something to strive for.

 

_Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken._

 

===

 

Sansa does not love Jon.

 

How can she? She once called him brother, has only recently come to know him as cousin, does not _know_ him truly, and is given no time to come to do so.

 

They are wedded and bedded, though he offers her the option of refusing the latter on their wedding night. “We do not have to do this. Now, if you are not yet comfortable,” he quickly corrects himself, knowing his duty.

 

She refuses the kindly meant offer because she knows her duty, too, and knows that neither of them has a choice, truly.

 

He almost seems stung that she does not find it more difficult to let him bed her, which puzzles her. Would he prefer that she recoil from his touch, forever disgusted at the thought of lying with a man she once called brother? Given the circumstances, they cannot afford to be squeamish about such things.

 

Within two weeks, he is gone.

 

===

 

Within two moons’ turns, Sansa knows she is with child, but she keeps the knowledge close until there is no doubt.  

 

Jon’s reply is hastily scribbled and his replies to her thereafter are prompter than she would have expected, knowing the distance their ravens must travel. She tries to reply as quickly, suspecting he may welcome the brief distraction, however silly, from the bloody battles he must fight.

 

But it is not easy; they did not speak as much to one another as their other siblings as children and she never wrote him from King’s Landing. She often does not know what to say beyond giving an accounting of the continuing repairs to the keep and his latest letter proves especially difficult.

 

Sansa loved her eldest brother, loves him still, but the fact of the matter is that he did not fight for her. He left her imprisoned, for all intents and purposes, with the Lannisters and, as she has learned from her bannermen, named Jon his heir over her. She knows she was married to a Lannister, that he could not have known the marriage went unconsummated, but he might have made provision for a change in her situation, yet he did not. He did not think of her at all, did not even _care_ , would not trade the Kingslayer for her!

 

She loves her brother, but she is not sure she can forgive those betrayals, even of a dead man. They still hurt. She does not think she could bear a living, breathing reminder in the form of another Robb Stark, a child that might not exist at all if her fate had depended on her indifferent brother.

 

 _Targaryen_ , she reminds herself, but she says none of it aloud or in her letters to Jon. She cannot say such a thing to him; he adored Robb and she is certain he will not hear a word against him.

 

She writes another truth instead. _I do not think it wise. Pray recall who Robb was named for._

 

The Dragon Queen would not suffer her heir to be named for a man named for the Usurper.

 

 _I see your point. Eddard, then_ , Jon writes back.

 

Naming their son for Father would also risk the Dragon Queen’s wrath, given his role in the War of the Usurper and his close friendship with Robert Baratheon.

 

But it seems that Jon has begun to learn the game of thrones. _He was my –_ There’s a scratch-out there she suspects was the beginnings of the word “father” – _uncle, as a father to me, who saved me from the same fate as Princess Rhaenys and the false Aegon by calling me his, and your father besides. There is nothing improper in naming our son for him._

 

No doubt the queen would prefer Rhaegar for her heir’s heir, but Daenerys cannot argue with what Jon writes. She would have no heir at all if not for Ned Stark.

 

===

“A healthy girl, Princess,” says bumbling Maester Samwell.

Sansa tries not to weep, knowing the birth of a girl will be seen as a failure.

 

But when she has her babe in her arms, she steels her spine. This is her daughter and she will fight to the death for her, will not allow her to feel lesser, _ever_.

 

The only problem is that the world will not make that easy. Alysanne – for Good Queen Alysanne, a good Targaryen name, the sort of queen Sansa hopes her daughter will be (no _Daenerys_ for Sansa’s daughter) – is perfect, but Sansa is her mother and bound to think so.

 

No one else may see her so because she is not a boy and perhaps even because of her looks. Alysanne is a beautiful babe, it is true, but like her father, she does not look the slightest bit Targaryen. Nor does she look the slightest bit Stark, the slightest bit like him. Alysanne is Sansa in miniature. The truly malicious may wonder whether Jon is in fact her father, remembering the actions of the last queen consort of Westeros.

 

But Sansa is no Cersei Lannister. She has no living brother to father her children and found it difficult enough to lie with the husband she once called brother.

 

===

 

_My heartiest congratulations, dear Sansa._

_Jhiqui wrote –_

Daenerys had insisted that one of her trusted handmaidens remain at Winterfell with Sansa. As she could not bear to be parted from Missandei, Jhiqui had stayed behind. “To teach you,” Daenerys said. “You are now a princess not just of the Seven Kingdoms, but of my eastern holdings, yet you know no other part of my realm.”

 

What Daenerys meant was to put a spy in her new good-niece’s household, no doubt. Probably to ensure she does not cuckold her nephew.  

_– that the princess is healthy, thank the gods, and beautiful like her mother._

 

Sansa wonders if that is a rebuke or the sort of aspersion she had feared as she looked down at her newborn babe.

_Jon tells me that the wildlings of the North call red hair lucky, “kissed by fire.” I think that sounds most appropriate for the next Targaryen queen. Our words, after all, are Fire and Blood._

Sansa often thinks the Dragon Queen hates her for not being Arianne Martell, for having once styled herself – however briefly – Queen in the North, for being fertile when she is barren, for things she does not know. But the formal proclamation – stating that Alysanne will follow Jon in the succession and that the succession will be entirely on the basis of birth order and not gender – accompanying her congratulatory letter feels like a benediction.

===

 

In the years since she last saw and later lost her mother, Sansa has felt a mix of emotions. Above all, she mourns her mother. There was no better mother in Westeros.

 

As she learns Jon better, begins to understand the man he’s grown to be beneath the armor he never quite seems to remove, she sees glimpses of the boy he was during their childhood at Winterfell, beloved by their shared siblings, yes, but bitter and a little bit broken by his bastard birth, by the slights large and small that flowed from it.

 

Not only from strangers, but from within Winterfell, the way her mother’s resentment chilled any room she entered that contained Jon also, how Sansa mimicked her beloved mother’s treatment of her half-brother and Jeyne Poole with her. Though it grated at the time, that her siblings did not seem to know how to be _proper_ , Sansa is grateful now that she was the only Stark child to pattern herself after her mother in that particular propriety.

 

But Sansa also understands that her mother was in an impossible position. Few, if any, other highborn ladies would have tolerated their lord husbands foisting a bastard upon them to be raised alongside their trueborn children.

 

Given that her parents’ marriage had, by all accounts, been unusually close and loving and that her parents had had great respect in addition to great love for one another, it is unfathomable that Father would never have told Mother the truth. Sansa understands the need for secrecy, as Jon’s very life was at stake, but she also knows enough of her mother, of her motivations ( _family, duty, honor_ ) to know that she would have kept the secret, because telling the truth would have endangered not just Jon, but her husband and children, too. It likely would have meant _all_ their deaths if King Rob – the Usurper was sufficiently wroth.

 

He likely would have been angry enough to put them all to the sword. _Ours is the Fury_ were the Baratheon words, after all.

 

===

 

 _Hers_ is the fury when she peers at the child in her husband’s arms, whom he simply introduces as “Ben.”

 

Sansa breathes through her nose, tells herself that at least Jon had the sense not to do so when he first arrived, before others.

 

Instead, he has waited until after she proudly showed him their new daughter – the babe he planted in her belly before leading his men to quell unrest in the Westerlands – before the entire keep, little Ryanna who even now sleeps peacefully in her crib, after she celebrated his return with the grandest feast Winterfell has seen since before Sansa’s father became the Usurper’s Hand, when she expected they would finally retire to their bedchamber, fall to the feather mattress, and make up for their time apart.

 

It has been many moons, enough that the stubborn weight clinging to her stomach and hips after Ryanna’s birth has left her at last, enough that the angry pink marks that marred her stretched belly have faded to silver after a pregnancy that altered her far more than her first, enough that she will not be so very shy about her changed appearance, though she might insist Jon snuff out the candle first, if she is not too distracted. She has _desperately_ missed his hands and mouth and –

 

And now she is so furious she will like as not bar her husband from her bed for the rest of his days.

 

It is the name, not the boy’s wild dark curls or Stark grey eyes, that tells her what her husband is too craven to say aloud. Ben is obviously short for Benjen, whom Jon loved dearly and followed to the Wall. It seems even the Prince Who Was Promised does not have the gall to name his bastard son for the late uncle who also happens to be his wife’s father.

 

It would be one indignity too many and even without it, she wants to tear his eyes out, rip the skin off that solemn face of his, so like her lord father’s.

 

Except her lord father had honor, in truth, and her princely husband has now shown himself to have none.

 

“We must speak. Alone,” Jon insists before she can say a word.

 

“We are perfectly alone, my lord. Save the . . . boy, but he will hardly repeat our conversation, will he?”

 

“Sansa, it’s not what you –”

 

“Begging your pardon, Your Grace, but I fail to comprehend how I could misunderstand you bringing your _bastard_ into this castle, under my –”

 

Even now, Jon’s eyes flash at that which reminds him of his old place at Winterfell, how Sansa was a beloved daughter of the House and he merely the lord’s bastard.

 

Even now, it is she who is the Stark in Winterfell, not Jon, and she knows he wishes, in the darkest recesses of his heart, that it were he, that Winterfell is far dearer to him than anything his Targaryen heritage has to offer. Sometimes she thinks Jon would rather have remained a Stark bastard than be revealed as a trueborn Targaryen.

 

Yet Sansa came to think that that wish disappeared when he eventually grew to love her as a husband ought to love his wife, that like her he must realize they could never be together if he were truly a Stark. But he obviously _does not love her_ if he can do such a thing to her. He may have fathered the boy before their marriage was anything more than duty, as the boy looks to be of an age with Alysanne, but to do so and then bring him home to her without so much as an apology, knowing that it will hurt and shame her beyond the telling –

 

It is monstrous and it _devastates_ her. That it can do so suggests she has not lost all her childish naïveté after all.

 

“I would not speak within,” Jon insists.

 

===

 

Jon chooses the godswood. Of course he does.

 

It feels a mockery to talk of his betrayal in the place where they swore each other the most solemn of vows.

 

He places his right hand on the heart tree and looks at her with intensity beyond even his usual. “I swear to you, Sansa, by the old gods and the new –”

 

 _The Seven we do not believe in_ , she scoffs to herself.

 

“On my life and yours and our daughters’ –” He closes his eyes and takes a breath. “Ben is not my son.”

 

“Do you take me for a fool?” she screeches. “I may be the last Stark, but you – _you_ have always looked the part and he is your very image!”

 

“You were not the last Stark,” Jon says tiredly, barely loud enough to hear in the midst of her tirade.

 

She does not understand. Is he speaking nonsense to distract her, is he –

 

“Arya escaped.”

 

Something catches in her chest and she forgets her anger over the bastard boy her husband has brought home to shame her, forgets _everything_ but the hope unfurling in her chest at the thought that she is not alone, that she is _not_ the last – “She lives?”

 

Jon sighs and ducks his head. “Oh, Sansa.”

 

“Jon, please –”

 

When he looks up, she sees his heart in his eyes and it is broken. She does not need to hear what he says next to know the truth.

 

“You _are_ the last of your siblings, but not as long as we thought.”

 

She slides down the trunk of the heart tree, the bark digging into her back and falls to the ground, weeping. For just one shining moment –

 

When Jon sits down next to her and his arms come around her, she is too far gone in her revived grief to push him away.

 

After a long, long while, she quietens, wrung dry, and remembers what brought them here, what stoked her fury, because anger is easier to bear than sorrow. Sorrow weakens her and anger gives her strength. She stiffens her spine and hardens her voice, hoarse at is. “And what does the boy have to do with my sister?” Sansa cannot say her name. “Are you so cruel and craven that you would give me such news to distract –”

 

“The boy is Arya’s,” he says, the merest of whispers into her hair.

 

Her heart hammers in her chest. “Then why say he is –”

 

“He would be in the greatest danger otherwise.”

 

“Why would he be safer as your bastard?”

 

Sansa knows what it is to be a bastard, for all that Alayne Stone was not real, but Jon knows it better. Why would he put such a label on a child? Unless he was a bastard in truth and Jon thought mayhaps he would be better treated as a royal bastard than as that of a dead noblewoman (her heart twists) and an unknown father. But –

 

“Even if Arya was not married to the father, well, who would know that? If you say otherwise, you are the Crown Prince and none will dare question you. We could still care for him, raise him here with our daughters as what he truly is, our nephew, and teach them to love him as a brother.”

 

“You don’t –”

 

“As your bastard, he may well be in more danger. Enemies of the crown might seek to twist him against the girls, establish him as a figurehead for rebellion, have him wrest the Iron Throne itself from Alysanne!” A sudden sense of panic claws at her as realizes the danger the boy – her sister’s son, her own nephew – may pose to her girls if they are not careful. He looks to be of an age with Alysanne; if Jon calls him son . . .

 

Much to Jon’s disgust, Sansa brought the Spider north when Daenerys dismissed him from King’s Landing, knowing _someone_ in the royal family must be apprised of the unseen dangers the Spider’s little birds are so good at uncovering. But for Alysanne’s sake and now Ryanna’s, for hers and even for his own, Jon will not make her father’s mistakes. He listens to Sansa and learns to play the game of thrones better with each passing day. Though he does not like it, he understands now that the Spider’s presence in their midst is a necessary evil. _Keep your friends close and your enemies closer._

Thanks to Varys, Sansa knows the rumors well. Even among those who do not begrudge Daenerys seizing the throne ahead of Jon, the only remaining heir to the last king’s heir, there are many who believe a woman is not fit to rule, who count the days until Jon succeeds the queen, who grumble at his lack of sons, who jape that he ought to do as Aegon the Conqueror did, as his own father did –

 

“Silence!”

 

“You will not _silence_ me on the subject of my children’s safety, my prince,” she all but snarls.

 

“You were loud enough to wake the entire castle, if not the dead in the crypts, my lady,” Jon bites out in return.

 

Resisting the urge to bare her teeth at him is difficult. She has an equally strong and sudden mad urge to laugh. What a time for her wolf’s blood to finally show itself.

 

“ _Our_ daughters are perfectly safe. Ben is not. Daenerys would not suffer him to live if the identity of his true father is known.”

 

She is beginning to wonder if the many battles he has fought have addled her husband’s wits, because what would the queen care for the illegitimate child of Sansa’s dead sister? “What matters Arya’s child to her?”

 

“There are those of . . . certain blood the queen wishes to see dead. Trueborn and baseborn alike. Do you understand, my lady?”

 

Sansa sees the face of all those Daenerys has had – She shakes her head. They were not _put to the sword_.

 

===

 

Sansa is invited – nay, commanded – to attend the executions in King’s Landing. No invitation from Daenerys is ever truly an invitation and Sansa knows it, so she makes ready to leave for the capital despite her condition. She must wait to tell Jon, for he would like as not insist they remain, unmindful of the queen’s wrath.

 

Although there is no love lost between Sansa and most of the condemned, the idea of burning a man alive disgusts her. The northern way is more honorable. _He who passes the sentence should swing the sword._ But she knows her duty.

 

She also knows her stomach after Alysanne. When bile rises in her throat as the first man’s flesh sizzles, she flees to avoid emptying it before the entire court.

 

“The smell,” she says apologetically when Daenerys commands that she attend her after the day’s executions. “It bothers me. I am usually hardier, but I am presently afflicted by mother’s stomach.” She drops her eyes, as if shy, so Daenerys does not see the truth in them, that the sight of burning men roils her sensitive stomach as badly as the smell of their charred flesh.

 

Once she processes Sansa’s admission, Daenerys smiles, pleased. Sansa can hear the thoughts behind that smile. _An heir and a spare, very good._  

 

“We meant to tell you properly – well, I, I mean, I have not yet told Jon, I knew we were needed here and did not want him to fret about the journey –”

 

“Do not apologize,” Daenerys interrupts. “You will be excused from attending any such occasions –” It seems even the Dragon Queen is too craven to call them what they are: _executions_. “For the remainder of your stay. I would not have you upset.”

 

The queen, it turns out, is as possessive and protective of Sansa’s children as any father. She tells the servants that Sansa’s orders and requests are to be treated as seriously as her own.

 

But it matters not; it is too late. Sansa bleeds that same night.

 

The only good to come of it is that the loss binds her and her husband together far more strongly than their other shared losses, even more than the birth of their daughter.

 

===

 

Daenerys takes Alysanne everywhere during that first visit to King’s Landing. “So that you might rest, dear Sansa,” Daenerys says each day Sansa remains abed regaining her strength.  

 

She whispers to Sansa’s chubby babe, tells her tales of her conquests, promises “This will all be yours someday, little one,” and is so thoroughly besotted with the child that Sansa fears she will ask for Alysanne long before she is needed in the capital, before she is grown, before Sansa feels she has taught her firstborn enough to survive and thrive in the viper’s nest that is King’s Landing.

 

The queen spends so much time with Sansa’s daughter and lavishes her with such attention that Sansa also fears that if Alysanne did not know well that _she_ is _Mama_ , did not prefer her arms to all others, she would take to calling Daenerys Mother instead.

 

===

 

“When Daenerys –” Jon does not finish, but Sansa finishes the thought in her own mind. _When Daenerys is dead and Jon is king and I queen, then we will tell the truth._

===

 

Sansa keeps her distance. She has no choice; she is Catelyn Stark’s daughter and no one who remembers her late mother would believe that she would so easily accept her husband’s bastard, a slight to her honor living and breathing under her own roof, no matter that her husband is a prince and all save the queen must obey him. Ben’s very life may depend on Sansa’s ability to play the betrayed wife.

 

She is not unkind, not even icy like her mother was to Jon; she merely keeps her distance, does not show Ben the warm affection she lavishes on her daughters, but still, it breaks her heart to do so.

 

===

 

It seems the gods mean to punish them for their lies when Ben and Alysanne are five. Ben and the girls all fall ill, but Aly and Rya recover quickly enough while Ben grows worse and worse.

 

Finally, Sansa cannot bear it, the hours of skulking outside her nephew’s room like a thief, trying to remain out of sight of Maester Samwell and the servants. She enters, snatching the basin and cool cloth from the lone maid at Ben’s side, who seems half-terrified of her yet will not leave the room.

 

“Leave us be,” she gropes for the girl’s name, but she is so worn she cannot recall it, though she knows each and every member of her household. “I will care for my – stepson,” she finishes awkwardly.

 

The girl pales, hesitates, but leaves.

 

 _But gods, does she fear I will smother him while he lies dy –_ Sansa shakes her head furiously. _He cannot_ _die. He_ will not _die._

 

Pale, sweat-soaked and shaking, Ben is half-delirious. When he opens his eyes, he stares up at Sansa and something that she thinks is supposed to be a smile passes over his pained face. “They said you wouldn’t come now it’s just me.”

 

When all three children had been sick, the maester hesitantly suggested it would be easiest to keep them all in the same room, _if that would be acceptable._ To Sansa, of course.

 

With Sansa’s leave, the children had been moved into one room together and Sansa had sat with them and sang to them and dabbed the sweat from her daughters’ brows, but never Ben’s if someone else was there to see – 

 

Something inside her breaks at Ben’s words, but she weeps only once his fever has broken and he sleeps, oblivious to her tears.

 

===

 

As he grows, Ben shows himself to be Arya’s child more every day.

 

Not even Sansa will raise her voice to Jon before others, not only because they do not make a habit of raising their voices to one another, but also because in public he is the Crown Prince first and her husband second.

 

But Ben rages at Jon one day before their small Northern court when Jon makes a ruling Ben deems unjust on some matter concerning the smallfolk. His bastard birth renders him neither the sullen, silent boy Jon had grown into nor stubborn and scowling like his true father, one of Robert Baratheon’s many bastards, in a “mood,” to hear Brienne of Tarth tell it.

 

Brienne of Tarth, the only other soul save Jon and Sansa who knows the truth of Ben’s birth, who had kept the boy hidden away for his own safety. Lady Brienne felt that she had failed in her vow to Sansa’s mother, as she had not brought either Stark daughter home – never mind that Sansa was alive and well in Winterfell – and had not been able to save Arya from the bloody bed. Had not been able to save Jaime Lannister from the Dragon Queen’s wrath either, though they had only learned Lady Brienne’s feelings regarding that particular failure when she fell ill with the same fever that afflicted Ben and the girls.

 

But Lady Brienne will not fail in protecting Arya’s boy. Or Sansa’s girls.

 

Lady Brienne confirmed Jon’s story all those years ago, trusting that if the Dragon Prince cared so for the safety of Arya Stark’s child by a Baratheon bastard when his aunt sought to eradicate the Baratheon line altogether, Arya’s own sister would twice over.

 

Lady Brienne has long since ceased calling Jon the Dragon Prince. It is a title he used to hate – _‘twas Aegon, not me!_ – but now merely scoffs at, each time eying Ghost at his side – _Targaryen or no, I am a wolf first_ – while “his” dragon remains at King’s Landing with Daenerys. Lady Brienne remains at Winterfell with them to this day, officially as sworn sword to their royal daughters.

 

It is unheard of for members of the royal family to share a sworn sword, but given Lady Brienne’s self-appointed duty, it will not do for her to be sworn to Alysanne alone, who will one day have to go south. Yet it would be passing strange for Ryanna, who stands to follow Sansa as Lady of Winterfell and Warden of the North, to have a sworn sword while her elder sister, who will one day rule the Seven Kingdoms, goes without and Sansa has yet to find a knight she trusts half so well as Brienne of Tarth.  

 

===

 

“Let me go!”

 

Ben is not Jon; he does not wish to go the Wall like his “father” once did. He wishes to go east, most likely for adventure and glory. This is a recent but already old argument.

 

“I will do no such thing.”

 

“But you will let Alysanne –”

 

“She _must_ go. I have no choice in the matter. It is the queen’s will.”

 

“But I was the one born there –”

 

“And then I brought you here, where –”

 

“I wish you’d never done it! I hate Winterfell, the North, all of Westeros! I hate you and your lady wife!”

 

 _And your daughters_ , Sansa finishes sadly.

 

There is the barest shake to Jon’s voice that Sansa is certain only she can hear as he voices her thought. “No mention of your sisters?”

 

“’Tisn’t their fault or mine we’ve such a tyrant for a father. I fear for Westeros when you are king, Your Grace,” Ben spits.

 

It is treason even to hint at the death of a reigning monarch, which would needs occur before Jon could ascend the throne, but Jon does not scold him for it.

 

When Jon makes love to her that night, he is fiercer than usual, dragon and wolf in equal measure, with none of his tender, filthy, worshipful words to soften it.  

 

===

 

Ben comes to her solar the following morning and bows. “Your Grace?”

 

“Yes?” She has long since given up on telling Ben to call her _Sansa_ and cannot tell him to call her what she truly is to him.

 

“Alysanne has no sworn sword.”

 

“There is Lady –”

 

“Lady Brienne is sworn to all three of my sisters. Aly will be queen someday and will soon be traveling into dangerous lands at Queen Daenerys’ behest. Lady Brienne will remain here with Rya and Aryelle, though they have far less need of her.”

 

 _She stays for_ you, _dear boy._ But now Sansa begins to understand what her nephew wants.

 

However, any arrangement that keeps Ben close to Alysanne would draw Daenerys’ attention exactly where they do not want it: to Ben. It has been hard to keep it from him, as Daenerys, in her own way, is as family- and affection-starved as Jon and Sansa were during the war. Their family is all her family in the world.

 

There is a part of Daenerys that Sansa knows wishes to do much for Ben. It was a son Daenerys lost as a young woman, not a daughter. And as Ben is not Sansa’s child, she would not have to share him with Sansa as she must share Sansa’s daughters.

 

===

 

In fact, Daenerys goes so far as to offer to legitimize Ben in letters she writes that Jon _must not show Sansa_ shortly after Jon returns to Winterfell with the boy. She would put Ben wherever in the succession Jon wishes, save before Alysanne. _Alysanne is your firstborn and heiress and none, not even a son, will replace her. It is my will._

When Jon refuses her _generous offer_ (she writes a long, scathing letter in reply), Daenerys orders that Ben be sent to her as a ward.

 

Again, Jon refuses her curtly without explanation.

 

Daenerys takes that refusal more calmly, assuming that when he shared the order with Sansa (he could not very well send his son to King’s Landing without explanation), Sansa took offense at her husband’s bastard being honored so.

 

They do not correct the assumption.

 

===

Perhaps they have been foolish. Ben looks so like Jon that there is no reason for Daenerys to suspect his true origins. And if he remains close to Alysanne and therefore to Daenerys, perhaps the queen will grow to love him enough that even if the worst should come to pass . . . “Lady Brienne will go.”

 

“But –”

 

Sansa makes her decision then. Benjen is nearly a man grown. They have refused to send him to squire, but they cannot keep him hidden away in Winterfell much longer. His wolf’s blood runs too fast and too hot for it; he is too much his mother’s son. He will leave, with or without their permission if it comes to that. If he must go from them, there is no safer way for him to do so than with Brienne of Tarth at his side. “You must have an experienced sworn sword to teach you. That is what you wish, isn’t it? I heard you speak to your father about going east last night and you seem so very concerned about Alysanne today.”

 

Ben colors but remains silent.

 

“Benjen?”

 

“Yes, Your Grace, that is correct.”

 

“I make no promises, as your father must decide and the queen must approve, but I will tell him it is my wish that you and Lady Brienne accompany Alysanne on her journey with the queen. In return, you must apologize to him. You were quite unkind last night. Though he would not own it, I know he was grievous hurt.”

 

“I will, Your Grace. Thank you, truly.”

 

The look in Ben’s eyes tells her just how heartfelt the words truly are.

 

===

 

Winterfell feels so very empty without Jon, gone first to fill Daenerys’ place in King’s Landing while she shows her eastern lands to Alysanne, without Alysanne herself, without Ben, even without Lady Brienne.

 

Ryanna and Aryelle are both so independent now, the dark-haired, blue-eyed wolf pups that remind their parents of the girl they both called sister. They have little and less need of their mother with every passing day – Ryanna has already _flowered_ , gods be good! Yet they still let her brush their hair each morning and night because they know it pleases her, because they know she can no longer do so for Alysanne, who enjoys it most.

 

Sansa prays every day that she has made the right decision, hands folded over her belly where a babe has taken root again after so many years, as she entreats the old gods before the heart tree.

 

 _A welcome, if unexpected, parting gift_ , _husband_ , she thought with a small laugh when Maester Samwell confirmed that her symptoms did not signal the change she feared. She misses Jon fiercely, but their growing babe eases the ache in her heart even as the ache in her back grows stronger by the day.

 

Only time will tell if Sansa’s prayers will be answered. She has no choice but to believe the old gods will be kinder than the Seven ever were.  


End file.
